The current public switched telephone network employs thousands of switches, multiplexors, and other telecommunications devices that must work in concert in order to provide for the connection and completion of the ordinary telephone call. Many of these devices provide for status information which is sent back over the network to control centers regarding the health of the network.
Different methods have been utilized in the past to present information from telecommunications network equipment to a network operator who is responsible for monitoring and controlling the operation of that equipment. The most common of these methods used computers that provide information to the network operator, responsible for controlling the network, in a simple text-based presentation of the equipment activity as provided by the equipment manufacturer. The presentations are typically chronological reports of equipment activity which may not be relevant to the network operators needs. Moreover, a network operator is unable to tailor the presentation to address new needs corresponding to a changed operational environment.
Further, historical information is not available in concert with real-time information, and in some systems historical information is not available at all.
In another approach, telecommunication network maintenance and monitoring is addressed with the use of a computer support system, typically using computer displays called "awareness screens" or "alarm monitors." The computer support system extracts information available from the telecommunications equipment and delivers it to a network operator on a computer display. However, these displays are inflexible, in -that a network operator cannot tailor the display for the assessment of the current problem. Again, historical and real-time information is not combined.
This inflexibility presents difficulties for the network operator in that he has to look for information about events in different locations and manually, perhaps on paper, combine the different information in order to understand the complete picture.
Additionally, there are currently no existing techniques for providing telecommunication operators or network operators with the ability to group certain information regarding the status of the telecommunications network into packages called tasks and provide for a common location for retrieval and viewing on a computer display. The information must be grouped according to its relevancy to the problem at hand, and may change dynamically over time.
What is desirable is single, common presentation of all pertinent information, whether real-time or historical, for dynamically controlling a telecommunications operating environment that dynamically allows a network operator to group or combine relevant information in a task package and manipulate that package as a whole rather than the underlying information.